Sandy Jeffs

The word ‘psychosis’ is derived from Greek, and etymologically means ‘life of the spirit’, or ‘to give animation to soul and mind’. This sense of ‘life’ or ‘animation’ has manifested through literatures of madness in a plethora of movements and forms. We’ve had the comically deluded protagonist of Don Quixote; the lunatic fool on the Renaissance stage; the manic villain in the superhero film; and, in the contemporary Australian context, caricatures of madness in films such as Cosi and Mental.

In her poem ‘The suicides’, Janet Frame writes: ‘know they died because words they had spoken/ returned always homeless to them’. Perhaps more deaths could be prevented if people were able to speak without fear of being shamed or ostracised, knowing that their words might lodge in someone’s mind or heart, and that language, if wrestled with, could offer healing.